Christmas Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Pews have been emptying for many years now. Services have gone from traditional to entertainment in just one generation. Newer generations just couldn’t be bothered with a service centered on time-tested prayers, religious music, and most importantly, God. No, they had to focus the service on themselves, like everything else in their lives, so services became a place where people expressed themselves in made-up song, dance, and art useful for the moment. The more elaborate, so much the better to reach the Divine. Never mind that our ancestors found God in plain clapboard churches or simply read their Bibles. In fact, these days, if fancy doesn’t do it for you anymore, why not skip church altogether? Christmas Day services will not be held at several major churches this year. One pastor rationalized that staying home on Christmas Day ‘decentralizes’ the church, apparently a good thing. Hey Reverend, how about this--it dilutes, diminishes, or eventually destroys the church. (Funny how liberals want to centralize State power to rule over others, but love to decentralize religious institutions.) Another evangelical church will be handing out a DVD, the better to reach the masses with. I guess that the tired masses that can’t make it to church all own DVD players. The religious leaders of these churches opine that the Christmas story is really a family story about a couple who had a baby, so to honor Jesus, just spend quality time with your own family. Yes, I’m sure that the millions who can now stay home from church guilt-free (sorry Catholics, not you) will be solemnly contemplating the meaning of the birth of Christ, heads bent in prayer, voices lifted in songs of praise. Yes, I’m sure that each poor believer has a family with which to worship. Come on, if the supposed role model for the flock won’t even be working on Christmas Day, why would the flock be doing anything else but going hither and yon doing whatever it damn well pleases? Hmmm…let’s try to imagine a world without churches and church services…hey, clergy wouldn’t be needed…their salaries could go to the poor instead of to people so uncommitted to their faith that they can’t even show up to hold a church service on Christmas Day. Why worship together, even though the Scriptures tell us that we should, when we can save so much money? Yeah, let’s just make the church line up with the selfish needs of the people, those who can only think of the mess that their Christmas Day schedule will be in if they have to factor in an hour for church…well, more than an hour because, to be polite, you have to greet your neighbors and fellow parishioners…what a pain. Yes, let’s continue to make church so PC, so culturally correct, that all we have to do is read a liberal rag, watch a liberal newsman, listen to a liberal politician or watch the current movie to find out the right thing to do. The New York Times…the good news is with us, hallelujah! Dan Rather…praise be to God! Howard Dean…the Spirit descends to earth! Hollywood liberals…may all the saints be examples to us! Today’s church doesn’t ask anything of people, doesn’t expect anything, and alters its beliefs to fit current PC ideas, so why attend at Christmas or any other time of year? The power and mysteries of faith that have altered the lives of men for centuries are only one more thing to schedule, or not, into our Blackberries. Now man can drag and click the worship of God to a more convenient day on the calendar. Thank man for technology…or is it thank God? See you in church on December 25th.

A Christmas Story: Nature vs. What?

The historical dilemma has been nature vs. nurture, i.e., whether your genes or your environment have shaped you into the magnificent creature that you are today. Unfortunately, the nurture part of the equation has changed dramatically. It’s value has been eroding thanks to the heartless leftists and self-absorbed feminists who want a soul-less State to raise children and who propagandize that all women are in bondage of some sort or the other, especially as concerns raising children. Only by denigrating the value of parenting and thus childhood do these people feel whole. After all, if one can wrest control of children from their parents, then absolute power is that much closer for those who think that to value parenthood and religion belongs to ‘lessor’ people. So the dilemma is no longer nature vs. nurture, but nature vs. non-nurture. The me-first 60’s generation found children to be good sources for social experimentation—communal living, multiple parents, suspect diets, open sexuality, etc. The non-nurtured offspring of the 60’s generation have gone one step further and found children to be a burden—annoying, time-intensive, lifestyle killers or status enhancers (similar to a $1,000 designer handbag) or an item to be given to others. Here’s a true story to illustrate the demise of nurturing and the rise of non-nurturing. A well-off, late 40’s-something woman (raised not by wolves, but in the 1960’s at Brown University) thought she might be pregnant. She already had one child. She reasoned thusly: I already have one child, and my husband and I don’t really want another kid, but our neighbors would like a child, so if I’m pregnant, we’ll give the kid to them. This woman showed no emotion as she said this. She could have been giving the lawn mower to her neighbors by the manner in which she was speaking. The stunned listeners to this tale gingerly pointed out to this emotionally pathetic woman that she and her husband would have their own child living next door to them, that the child might look like them, that sooner or later the neighbors would have to tell the child that he/she was adopted and who his/her real parents were, that their first child and the child who was passed off to the neighbors would someday learn that they are siblings and had been denied that relationship, that the adopted child would learn that his real parents—who had the money and time to love him/her—chose to discard him/her like a duplicate gift that they didn’t need. Well, it suddenly dawned on this hyper-indoctrinated offspring of socialism and rabid feminism just how heartless this all sounded to the people listening. She said, “Aw my gawd, you make it sound like I’m some sort of monster.” Wrong again, dearie. We didn’t make you sound that way. YOU chose to sound that way. While the listeners had been glad not to have heard the A-word in her story, everyone was appalled that this is what women have come to—the inability to move into adult responsibilities when faced with becoming the great Mother image that untold numbers of women have carried and added to throughout history. The eternal lessons of motherhood extend far beyond mere reproduction, though the supposed intellectuals of the Left never elaborate on this side of femininity, preferring the emotionally and spiritually void thinking of ‘now you’re pregnant, now you’re not.’ Thanks goodness such bankruptcy of thought was not around over 2000 years ago, when a man named Joseph accepted his responsibilities as husband and father, and a poor Middle Eastern girl named Mary accepted her nature, her femaleness, her impending motherhood--and gave birth to and loved a baby named Jesus.

Is Hillary O.K.?

I have been lying in bed for nigh on 10 days, having been smitten to the floor by this quote from my local newspaper, "But the Bush administration's pledge to stay in Iraq 'until the job is done' gives Iraqis 'an open ended invitation not to take care of themselves.'" The words in the little subquotes belong to one Hillary Rodham Clinton, the same Hillary Rodham Clinton who said that it takes a village to raise a child, although, of course, no one should expect her to be in the kitchen making chocolate chip cookies for said child (remember the great recipe debate). I guess that some lessor woman should be doing the manual labor of making cookies for kids, and not someone like Hillary, who actually needs to feel fulfilled, which apparently means not raising children, raising them with limited particpation, or hiring an illegal to bake cookies.

In any case, the socialist village woman that we all thought Hillary to be has now apparently become a defender of individual initiative (wait, gasp...heart rate escalating...breathing rapid...can't think, comprehend...alien transformation of humanoid senator...). Can someone please help me? Have I entered into a bizarro world where a leftist now speaks in a conservative tongue? Could she possibly have meant what she said? Surely this is just another instance where the press has taken a quote out of context? How is it possible that a Democrat can be appalled by an open-ended invitation not to take care of oneself? Isn't this what Democrats live for--the utter dependency of people on them for relief from everything, from being insulted (institute a speech code) to lack of self control (free marijuana and abortions for all!)? Hillary belongs to the party that despises self-reliance, that most sacred of American values, and instead worships, no, needs permanent dependency of the people in order to exist.

So why does it bother Hillary that Iraqis might want to enjoy the same thing that Democrats advocate for their own constituency, which is an open-ended invitation not to ever have to take care of yourself, ever suffer a let down of any sort, ever be challenged on any level about anything but always whine, whine, whine when your fellow citizens have not given you enough and sue, sue, sue if you sense discrimination (i.e., personal slight of the minutest magnitude)? Democrats depend for their livelihoods on permanently disgruntled people never taking the initiative to change or solve their own problems, much less learning to actually, say, run a business, which requires great personal initiative and risk, so why would they want Iraqis to run their own country? Wouldn't 25 million more dependents just be icing on the Democratic cake? Yes, Democrats are the party of Peter Pan, where child-like dependency extends forever, as the elite of the left haggle over the fine points of socialist or communist theories in Washington and New York salons. But, alas, we all know that childhood should not last forever except in Peter Pan's artificial world, and that is why there are conservatives--so that there will be grown ups. Perhaps Hillary is finally gowing up?